Thoughts as commands: start-up Sabi raises $50 million for brain-reading cap
A cap with hidden sensors is meant to read brain signals without surgery and turn them into input for AI assistants. Khosla Ventures led the funding round.
Symbolic image · Photo: Chris Hope / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 (cropped and resized)
Californian start-up Sabi has raised $50 million in a seed round led by Khosla Ventures. Other backers include Accel, Initialized Capital, DST Global and Kevin Weil, OpenAI's former chief product officer. The company announced the round on 9 October.
Sabi is developing a cap with hidden sensors designed to measure neural signals through the hair – without gel, without direct scalp contact and without surgery. The data is analysed by its own AI model, which the company says was trained on more than 100,000 hours of non-invasive brain recordings. The aim is to turn imagined speech into text and to give commands to AI assistants by thought.
The performance claims have not yet been independently verified. Sabi plans to show early versions at the CES 2027 technology fair in Las Vegas. Investor Vinod Khosla explained the bet on a solution without an implant: "You cannot perform a billion brain surgeries to replace a billion keyboards."